WHS flipped out last night...

A

-=Antimatter=-

2[H]4U
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Feb 8, 2005
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I added a 2TB drive last night to my external enclosure (a Sans Digital TR4M-B) attached to my HP Mediasmart. When I booted up, WHS had kicked three of my other drives out of the storage pool, including the data partition on the main system drive. All my data seems to be accessible. If I try to re-add the drives to the pool, the data on them will be lost; I'm worried that I might have a non-duplicated share on at least one of them.

This is what it looks like after leaving it overnight (I added the 2TB to the pool):

http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/1153/59415986.jpg
http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/7505/45191201.jpg
http://img527.imageshack.us/img527/2346/64787053.jpg

Has anybody ever seen this happen? I was hoping it would go away after a little time.
 
Just reboot it, that should fix the problem. I have seen a similar issue but only with one hard drive I had, when I replaced that hard drive, all the problems went away. Every time I inserted the hard drive that same thing would happen.
 
Pull the 2TB from the enclosure and reboot.

Should fix it.
 
Thats the strangest thing ive heard.

If it werent for the Screenshots im not sure I would even believe you. :)

umm not really sure what else you could do other than to add the 2tb to the pool, then copy your stuff back over to the pool, and readd the old drives.
 
I would verify all hardware connections. I don't use an HP Mediasmart, but received a similar error on my WHS due to the RAM voltage mysteriously changing on its own. Replacement of CMOS battery resolved it.
 
I put the drive back in, now it just sits there with the Health light blinking blue, not booting. What the heck...
 
-=Antimatter=- said:
I put the drive back in, now it just sits there with the Health light blinking blue, not booting. What the heck...
Click to expand...

If your machine won't boot, then one or more drives are bad. Pull all of the storage pool drives and see if it will boot. If it does, then you will know one of the drives is bad. You will get all kinds of file and missing drive warnings, but ignore them, You're just trying to see if you have a bad drive. If the system drive is bad, then you will need to do a system restore on a new drive. But based on your screenshots, you may have more than one bad drive. I had two drives in my MSS go bad at the same time a couple of months ago. The machine would not boot with the drives in place. Since I have over 20 drives in my MSS, it took me awhile to figure out which ones were bad, but once I did and replaced them the MSS became happy again.
 
I left the server on overnight, and it booted finally. Same situation as in the OP now.

I have a hard time believing that three drives would fail at the same time, and that the failure would coincide with the installation of a new disk. It's gotta be a software bug or something.

Nevertheless I will proceed with caution.
 
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OK, I figured out why it took forever to boot last night. I flagged it to run a disk check on startup of the DATA drive, so it was doing that all night long. I'm running a chkdsk on the system drive right now. I can still access all my files perfectly fine, but I still get the funky "not added" drives and "calculating sizes" bar.

No idea if duplication is working properly.
 
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I can't add OR remove the drives that were bumped from the pool. I think it's time to pull everything off the server and re-build, maybe a totally new system. Argh.
 
hrm.... sadly, this is why I still backup everything to a linux server... I wonder what the problem is/was though and if it might happen elsewhere. Did you install the drive while the server was off? then reboot? wonder if you would get the same error with a hot swap?
 
This happened to me too. I was never able to figure out why or fix it without readding the drives to the storage pool. It would happen again later after readding too. I tried doing a fresh install and it would still happen eventually. My only guess is some hardware incompatibly bug. Please post if you find a cause and/or solution for this issue.

The motherboard I’m using in my WHS system: EVGA 113-YW-E115-TR LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 730i.
 
Every time I've talked myself into trying WHS on my fileserver a post like this pops up.....
 
NeonFlak said:
Every time I've talked myself into trying WHS on my fileserver a post like this pops up.....
Click to expand...

Yeah, I realize no solution is foolproof, but WHS seems too hard to troubleshoot and not flexible enough in allowing you to back up with the OS/config-side of the system, seems like a fatal flaw for what's essentially a backup solution at it's core.
 
-=Antimatter=- said:
Still stuck in limbo like in the OP. Waiting to get my hands on more drives so I can offload and reinstall WHS from scratch. Or maybe Server 08. Hmm
Click to expand...

I'm thinking about moving to Server08 and just using DFS and robocopy to do drive spanning and folder duplication.


WHS is nice but IONO there is just something about it that I don't like but I don't know what.
 
 
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Finally got the new box up and running, waiting on one of the Supermicro 8 port cards and a 5-in-3 bracket so I can add the last two drives. :)

I should be able to squeeze in a total of 13 disks before I start thinking about the next expansion...feels a lot more spacious than the MSS for sure.

4pw7ll.png
 
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